


where the hedgerows slowly wind

by starsshinedarkly77



Series: if you let me be your skyline I'll let you be the wave [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Emotional Constipation, Financial Issues, Hurt/Comfort, Hux is Very Bad at feelings, M/M, Medication, Mental Health Issues, Painting, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-07-13
Packaged: 2018-07-23 17:21:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7472868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsshinedarkly77/pseuds/starsshinedarkly77
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Hux can hardly call he and Ren friends - they barely speak more than a handful of words to one another on the average day - but there is a certain level of camaraderie between he and Ren nonetheless, a sort of unspoken, mutual bond that has risen out of nothing more than sharing the same space with one another. Not a friendship, no, maybe not even an acquaintanceship, but still something; Hux would hazard to describe it as an alliance. Whatever it is, it is distant and it is quiet, and it suits Hux just fine."</p><p>In which Ren has a problem and Hux has a solution. In which, as Ren begins to open up, Hux's totally-not-feelings become just a little bit harder to ignore. In which Hux has wholly underestimated the power of art, and never will again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	where the hedgerows slowly wind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katherine1753](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katherine1753/gifts).



> I literally don't know what to say, other than this was not supposed to be this long. This was done as a fix exchange prompt for katherine1753 who did some lovely art for me in exchange for the prompt 'roommate au hurt/comfort'. I'm very sorry this took me so long, but as you can see, it got quite out of hand! You can thank the gracious and amazing acroamatica for the last, I dunno, six thousand or so words of this, because I sent them a draft to beta and they basically straight up told me to write the rest of the story. So I did. I really hope everyone enjoys this, because I had a blast writing it and working with acroamatica to make it as good as they thought it could be. Happy reading!
> 
> (Title from 'The Ghosts of Beverly Drive' by Death Cab for Cutie)

It’s 8 a.m. and for once, Hux’s roommate has left the apartment before he has.

Hux stands, blinking and a little taken aback, in the doorway of Ren’s room. His navy blue sheets and dark grey comforter are lying in a tangled pile on his mattress, but, to Hux’s great surprise, Ren is not hidden underneath the mound; Hux knows he can’t be, because Ren is too large to miss beneath such a small pile, and he sleeps with his limbs splayed all the way out, hands and feet each nearly touching a corner of the mattress, and besides that he snores like a freight train. Hux has never known him to rise before 11 a.m. And yet, this morning, he is inexplicably and undeniably absent.

Hux glances around the room once more, as if Ren is going to suddenly emerge from a darkened corner of the room and scream _“Boo!”_ , but of course no such thing happens, and Hux starts to feel uncomfortable being in Ren’s room without him there.

Technically, the room _does_ belong to Hux; the whole apartment does. Hux’s name is the only one on the lease, and Ren is merely a tenant, shelling out a certain amount of money a month to live here. Still, though, it feels odd to stand in the space that only Ren regularly occupies, staring at Ren’s personal effects scattered about the room. Books and stacks of papers and easels and paint palettes are absolutely everywhere, and his closet is thrown open to reveal a row of empty hangers and a large pile of clothes on its floor. Despite the general clutter and fullness of the space, there’s a distinct lack of furniture within it. Ren sleeps on a mattress on the floor, no bed frame or box spring, with two upside-down milk crates on either side serving as makeshift nightstands. There isn’t a single thing that resembles a dresser, desk, or chair in the entire room, unless Ren chooses to perch on top of teetering piles of books looking like a dark, sullen raven, à la some kind of Edgar Allen Poe story.

Hux backs slowly out of the doorway, acting on some impulse he doesn’t quite understand, and he instantly feels more at ease once the door to Ren’s bedroom is shut firmly behind him. Once in the hallway, though, he hesitates, then reaches into the messenger bag already slung from his left shoulder. He digs for Post-It notes, and when he comes up empty, only winces a little when he’s forced to resort to tearing a page out of the back of his sleek black Moleskine notebook. Hux leans against Ren’s door to scribble a note across the paper - even in his haste his script is passably neat, if you ask him - and then deftly folds it in half and slips it beneath the door.

It’s a reminder of how much rent he owes this month, as well as the day it’s due. Ren has a long history of being late with his rent, and when it is on time it’s nearly always a little bit short, and shoved over to Hux in a wrinkled envelope by an exhausted, harried-looking Ren. The first time he’d counted Ren’s rent money and come up with the wrong amount, he’d complained, perhaps a bit too sharply, and had watched crimson creep into Ren’s cheeks and the tips of his ears while he muttered apologies to the floor, said that he thought it was all in there and he’d find the rest, he would, he was really, really sorry. It hadn’t even been satisfying to find the rest of the rent money sitting on the kitchen counter the following morning, presented in a stack of crumpled fives and tens with a Post-It bearing another apology on top. It had been even less satisfying to watch Ren, eyes ringed with dark circles, subsist on very little food or sleep for the next five days, and the next time the rent had been short Hux had quietly chosen not to say a word. A few months ago, when his landlord raised the cost of his rent, he had neglected to mention it to his roommate.

This, of course, means he technically pays more than his fair share of the rent, on top of the fact that Ren wasn’t paying all that much rent to begin with, but Hux, rather uncharacteristically, can’t bring himself to mind. It was true that he had chosen to rent out his second bedroom to a tenant for a bit of extra income, but, well, it isn’t as if he really needed the money to begin with. The room - technically a guest bedroom - had been going to waste anyway; Hux, never anticipating having any guests to spend the night, hadn’t even furnished the room when he moved in, and had used it mostly for storage, but considering his lack of inclination to hoard sentimental objects, the room had remained nearly empty save for a few cardboard boxes stacked neatly in the closet. It was, in a way, a relief to fill it, comforting to see it looking inhabited, lived in, even if Ren didn’t have much to put in it at all. Phasma claimed that Hux had chosen to rent the room because he was _lonely,_ but that was of course absurd. It was logical to fill an empty room, and besides, if it had been company Hux had been looking for, Ren is the last person he would have chosen to live with.

Not that Ren is _unbearable,_ per se, but he certainly isn’t someone Hux would have chosen to befriend in his own time. This fact had become evident in the first moment he’d met Kylo Ren in person. He certainly could have been _worse;_ given the fact that Hux had resorted to posting a Craigslist ad in order to find a roommate, he supposes he should just be grateful that Ren hadn’t turned out to be a serial killer. Given Ren’s relatively articulate and polite message, though, Hux certainly hadn’t expected what he’d gotten and he’d observed with a vague and growing sense of dread and apprehension the long, tangled mass of dark hair, the ratty sneakers on his feet, the holes in the knees of his jeans that he suspected weren’t there exclusively for style purposes - and, of course, the various rings and studs that occupied various parts of his face, from his eyebrows to his bottom lip.

He’d been instantly uncomfortable to talk to, as well: he either made too much eye contact or not enough; he spoke oddly, stiltedly, uncertainly, and didn’t respond well to small talk, often answering questions with only one or two words; and despite the general lack of emotion or conviction in his words, his face was quite nearly overly expressive, changing minutely with every shift of conversation to reflect what he was feeling, no matter what it was.

He was definitely unsettling, but also, in some way, bizarrely endearing; despite Ren’s oddness, his awkwardness, Hux was left with the distinct impression that he was, above all, honest, somehow trustworthy - he said what he meant and he meant it fully, and on the rare times that he smiled, that rather too-full mouth turning up at the corners, it lit up his whole face, allowing Hux just a glimpse of what Ren _might_ have been, had they been friends.

It had been this, mostly, that had led to Hux coming around to the idea of living with Ren; that and the fact that, when taking the other applicants into consideration, Ren was far and above the least of many, many evils. Hux had decided that he would much rather live with a socially awkward ex-goth than, say, the loud young man who was a drummer for a living, or that one young couple who had been completely unable to keep their hands off of each other the whole time Hux was speaking to them. Ren wasn’t ideal, perhaps, but given Hux’s standards for other human beings, he was unlikely to find _ideal_ in this lifetime, unless he somehow convinced Phasma to move in with him, so _relatively harmless_ and _tolerable_ would have to be enough.

Some of his first impressions of Ren had turned out to be wrong, and Hux often finds himself questioning whatever poor fool had once said that first impressions were everything. While Ren had continued on in his original vein of being quiet and reserved a great deal of the time, he had also proven to be occasionally prone to loud and violent outbursts, the cause of which Hux has never known and values his own safety too much to inquire about. For the most part he is simply grateful that he has never been on the receiving end of one of these fits, and is only familiar with them (or even aware of them) to the extent that he can hear Ren through the walls of his room as they happen, throwing things around and occasionally striking against the walls or floors. Hux had gotten several complaints from irritated neighbors about these since Ren had moved in, but he’s yet to pass them on to the other man.

He’d expected from the start that Ren didn’t have very much income to spare, but the true extent of Ren’s lack of finances hadn’t become apparent until he’d actually moved in, when it began to sink in that Ren owned next to nothing and ate like a college student: everything he bought was frozen or boxed, he was an avid consumer of ramen, and not one food item he kept in the pantry was brand-name. Ren hardly ever revealed personal information without a great deal of prompting, but after a bit of subtle prying, Hux had learned enough about Ren to know he was working a minimum-wage job while he tried to hone his craft as an artist, which had yet to pan out after he graduated from college. Hux has never once seen him spend money on new art supplies.

He wouldn’t say that he _pities_ Ren, per se; in his experience the average person hated being pitied, and it felt awfully arrogant of him, someone who had never struggled financially in his life, to feel sorry for Ren or to judge him based on what he could and couldn't afford. But it is his choice to quietly accept the late rents, the rents that aren’t quite enough, and he chooses to do it, in part, because the thought of where Ren might live if he could no longer afford to live with Hux worries him. It is a kindness he can afford, so he affords it. Simple as that.

Though it is perhaps anything but simple. Hux can hardly call he and Ren friends - they barely speak more than a handful of words to one another on the average day - but there is a certain level of camaraderie between he and Ren nonetheless, a sort of unspoken, mutual bond that has risen out of nothing more than sharing the same space with one another. Not a friendship, no, maybe not even an acquaintanceship, but still something; Hux would hazard to describe it as an alliance. Whatever it is, it is distant and it is quiet, and it suits Hux just fine.

It does. It _does._ And any of the other little voices in his head can fuck off, frankly. His peculiar…not fixation, he won’t say that, but his _preoccupation_ with Ren means very little. Ren is the furthest thing possible from Hux’s type, but underneath all the piercings and torn up clothing and strange demeanor Hux cannot deny that Ren is _attractive._ Maybe not _hot_ or _sexy,_ at least not in any traditional way, but _cute,_ at the very least, and though Hux is not usually someone drawn in by _cuteness_ alone, there is something about Ren, something Hux cannot quite put his finger on, that he can’t quite shake off. Maybe it’s the fact that he sees Ren nearly every day and yet knows nearly nothing about him that causes the lingering curiosity Hux feels, the idle sensation that curls around his mind from time to time, when he’s staring into his morning coffee or curling up beneath his bedsheets at the end of the day. It’s only natural to wonder, the wondering is fine, but Hux pushes any other feeling, any other desire away; as far as he’s concerned, there _are_ no other feelings. None at all.

It occurs to Hux suddenly that he’s standing still at the kitchen counter, staring blankly into space, and has been for an indeterminate amount of time. A glance at his watch has him darting for the door, nearly dropping his keys in his haste to lock it and get moving down the stairs. He’s going to be late for work.

* * *

 

The apartment door is unlocked when Hux gets home, which isn't uncommon; no matter how many times Hux complains that anyone could walk in and steal all of his belongings while Ren is locked obliviously away in his bedroom with his headphones on, Ren still doesn’t remember to lock it when he comes in. At least this consistent lapse means that he always knows whether or not Ren is home before he even walks in the door.

However, when Hux steps into the apartment, he wonders if he himself had forgotten to lock the door upon leaving. Despite the lateness and subsequent darkness of the hour, there are no lights on at all, no windows open or shoes laying in the entryway; in short, there’s nothing at all to indicate Ren’s presence in the apartment. For one chilling moment, stepping into his own home feels oddly like stepping into a tomb.

The unnerving atmosphere is broken a second later by a loud _meow_ as Millicent pokes her fluffy orange head around the corner and leaps neatly onto the table in the entryway which she knows very well that she isn’t supposed to be on. Hux hangs his bag on the hook behind the door and lifts Millicent off the table and into his arms, ignoring both her _mrow_ of protest and the fact that his shirt is now absolutely coated in ginger fur. He scratches her behind the ears before walking through to the living room to place her on the back of the sofa, where she immediately curls herself into a tight little ball, settling in for an evening nap. Hux reaches to flick the light switch on, and that’s when he finally notices the figure standing in the kitchen.

The light from the living room isn't enough to fully illuminate the kitchen, but it’s enough to show Hux that Ren is standing at the stove, his back facing outwards, his head bent down, his arms stretched out so that his palms are pressed flat against the granite countertop. He is eerily still. Ren is nearly always moving some way, tapping his toes or flexing his fingers or shifting lightly from foot to foot, but at the moment he may as well be a statue; if Hux didn't know better he’d swear that Ren isn't even breathing, that’s how still he appears.

He remains immobile as Hux walks into the kitchen, not glancing up or even so much as flinching when Hux’s shoes squeak against the tile floor. From this angle Hux can see the row of empty orange pill bottles laid out in front of him, stretching out between his splayed hands. What he can’t see is Ren’s face, everything but the very tip of his nose hidden behind a thick curtain of his hair.

Hux’s jaw opens, shuts with a click. He meant to ask a question but the question is obvious just from his presence, and he’ll wait until Ren is ready to answer.

One long, quiet moment later, Ren moves, hunching down further over the stove before straightening up, rubbing one arm across his face, underneath his eyes.

“Sorry,” he mutters, “I’m in your way.”

He reaches out hastily to grab the bottles, scooping them against his chest, but as he does so one slips from his grasp. It bounces off the edge of the counter and, moved by reflex, Hux catches it before it can fall to the floor. He doesn’t lift it, though, doesn’t read the information on the sticker. It’s an intrusion of privacy Hux isn’t willing to make with Ren standing right beside him; he isn’t sure he would do it even if Ren _weren’t_ here. The bottle he’s holding has one oblong pill inside, and Hux tilts it, letting it clatter against the inside of the container.

“That’s the anti-depressant,” Ren says suddenly, voice flat, dulled at its edges. He puts one of the bottles back down on the stove. “This one is for anxiety, and _this_ one,” he sets the other back down, “is to offset the drowsiness from _those.”_ He taps the first bottle. “The one you’re holding is for tomorrow, and it’s the last one.”

Hux takes in the information silently, barely absorbs it. One part of him thinks _of course, makes sense, explains everything,_ and the rest of him can’t digest the full impact of what Ren has just admitted to him, so he files it away for later, focuses on the very last thing Ren said.

“The last one,” he repeats. He wants clarification and even though he hasn’t asked for it Ren seems to understand.

“I went to refill them today and the prices have gone up.” He sounds exhausted. “I don’t have health insurance. I don’t know how I can - I mean, I can go without the drowsiness ones but the other ones…I still can’t even afford just the two of those _and_ food _and_ rent but I -” He takes in a deep, shuddering breath. “I can’t work without them, I can’t do anything without them, I can barely leave the house if I forget to take them, I can’t go without them and I just don’t _know - “_ His voice breaks. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

There’s nothing Hux can think of to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything. Ren's breathing keeps hitching in his chest, and he is swallowing harshly, and Hux knows enough about people to know when someone is trying not to cry, but not enough about people to know what to do about it.

“I’m sorry,” Ren says hoarsely. “I know we’re not - this isn't really your problem, sorry.”

Hux waves away his concern, his apologies, with the hand still holding the prescription bottle. The lone rattling pill adds a definitive little _tick_ to the gesture.

“It’s,” he doesn’t want to say _fine,_ not when he’s watching Ren’s entire life come apart at the seams, so he doesn’t. Refrains. “Well, if you’re having a problem in my kitchen, then it sort of becomes my problem, doesn’t it?”

“Sorry,” Ren says again, pinched and tight, his shoulders hunching over once again. Fantastic. He’s made it worse.

“That isn’t what I - well, never mind,” Hux sighs. “My point is that I can help you sort this out, if you want me to.”

He feels too detached, too clinical, but he doesn’t know any other way to deal with crises besides throwing cool logic into the face of entirely illogical situations. He’s found it’s far better to have only one person falling apart at a time.

It’s easier to stay calm when it isn’t his crisis, certainly, but he has to admit that the thought of Ren being trapped by the confines of his own brain due to a lack of finances, of all things, makes him ache somewhere deep down inside, some place that he forgot that he could ache.

At first he thinks that it’s pity; he’s surprised to recognize it a second later as empathy.

Ren rakes his hair back off of his face, and seeing his expression for the first time since their conversation began is shocking. He looks exhausted, ancient, like he’s aged years in a single day, and the edges of his eyes are tinted pink from tears. The skin of his cheeks, too, is reddened from him rubbing it, and his mouth is drawn in a tight little line. His lower lip looks odd and out of place, and Hux realizes that Ren is biting down on the inside of his mouth, hard, hard enough to draw blood.

“Why would you do that?” Ren asks, and while his voice isn’t accusatory, it is searching, pointed. It’s a valid question, considering they barely know one another.

Hux has to mull it over. There’s no good answer, none that expresses or encapsulates everything that he’s feeling and thinking right this very moment. So he gets as close to the honest answer as he can.

“I don’t know,” he says.

Ren waits for more, and when nothing else comes, he huffs. Hux thinks at first that he is irritated by Hux’s response, but - no, there, there is the ghost of a smile haunting Ren’s lips, and his huff was something akin to a laugh rather than a sigh.

“Fair enough.”

They stand in silence for another moment.

“How much are the prescriptions?” Hux dares to ask next, and when he does so Ren’s head whips quickly towards him, his dark eyes narrowed into slits.

“You’re not buying my prescriptions,” he says, in a tone that leaves no room for argument. Luckily, Hux has always been very, very good at arguing.

“You can’t go without them,” Hux says firmly. He meets Ren’s gaze unblinkingly, unaffected by its intensity; he can see the embarrassment underneath it, the shame, just as he’s seen it before. “I could lower your rent. Something.”

“I can’t ask you to do that,” Ren says, then bites his lip again. “I’m not your fucking charity case.” The way he delivers the words, Hux can tell there is meant to be heat in them, but it falls flat, barely lukewarm.

“I didn’t say you were,” Hux says evenly.

“I already know I’m not paying all the rent I should be,” Ren presses on. “I’m not going to let you do any more for me than that. I...” And here he hesitates, looks down. “I don’t really deserve it.”

Hux valiantly chooses to ignore that statement, because it’s indicative of something that he has no hope of fixing, and he’d rather stick to what he _c_ _an_ fix: the tangible, the physical, the concrete.

“Ren,” he states, and then pauses until Ren reluctantly meets his eyes. “I can afford to help you, so I’m going to help you.” That still feels wrong, so he sighs, tries again. Puts the choice in Ren’s hands. “Please let me help you.”

Ren holds his gaze, long and lingering, and Hux thinks he’s searching for something, though he doesn’t know what. Whatever it is, he seems to find it, because he closes his eyes slowly, nods once. He purses his lips, and then breaks into a smile, or what passes for one, because there is certainly no joy in it, no relief, only self-deprecation tinged with some old sort of sadness.

“I’m such a fucking failure,” Ren says, like it’s an irrefutable fact, and when he opens his eyes again they are shining with unshed tears. “I’m too old to still be fucking up this bad. Everybody fucking told me, you know, that art school was a shit idea but I didn’t listen to anybody and now look where the fuck I ended up. Cosmically the only thing I’m doing is fucking wasting space.”

It’s like he’s shoved his beating heart into Hux’s hands, and the universe is saying _here, take this, don’t fuck it up,_ which is far easier said than done.

But somehow, impossibly, the solution to this, to everything, comes to him all at once.

“Let me show you something,” he says.

Ren blinks once, looking a little bemused, and Hux feels a wave of relief that this momentary confusion is apparently enough to take the shine of threatening tears out of Ren’s eyes, is enough to break the heavy hopelessness of his posture, his features. He rubs the back of his hand across his face, sniffs loudly, but he doesn’t seem inclined to expand upon his previous statement, to bring Hux’s attention back to it, and that suits Hux just fine.

“What is it?” Ren asks after a moment. His voice is dulled, subdued, but there is the barest hint of genuine curiosity in it.

Hux tilts his head in indication that Ren should follow him, and then turns and walks out of the kitchen. He doesn’t look back, but after a beat of silence he can hear Ren shuffling dutifully along after him as he walks swiftly and purposefully into the entryway. He stops in front of the little wooden table that holds a bowl to put his keys in when he comes in, and Ren pauses behind him; on instinct Hux takes a step back and to the right so that they are standing side by side instead of in front and behind.

He can feel Ren looking at him. The other man is trying to be subtle about it but he’s clearly side-eyeing Hux in between glances at the environment as he searches for what Hux is trying to show him and why. But it's a hard thing to miss, hanging obtrusively in its heavy gilded frame: the art print he'd bought, hastily and on sale from some home furnishing store he'd gone to when he’d first moved into his apartment and realized that he had nothing at all to hang on the walls.

“Horrible, isn’t it?” Hux says conversationally.

 _Horrible_ is no exaggeration: the print is awful and Hux knows it, is reminded of it every time he walks into his own home. Bare walls would have been better; in fact _anything_ would have been better than this print, which features various shapes, lines, and smudges depicted in a pallet of colors Hux can only describe as ‘muted vomit tones’. Hux, never much of an art buff himself, remembers wanting something simple and completely lacking in hidden meanings. The last thing he needs is for someone to walk into his home and tell him that whatever seemingly innocent art piece he had picked out was actually riddled with yonic symbolism.

The print had seemed ideal in the store somehow (Hux blames some sort of temporary insanity due to heatstroke or sleep deprivation, because _honestly, what was he thinking?_ ), but after he’d had it framed and taken it home he’d realized extremely quickly just how ugly it actually was, how it matched nothing else in the house, and how tacky it looked hanging right by his front door. But he’d already bought it, and paid quite a handsome amount for the frame and mat, so he’d left it hanging anyway, and treated putting up with it as some sort of test of will and mental fortitude, or else a convenient object to direct his frustrations towards after particularly long and exhausting days.

In short, the print is hideous, and Hux knows that Ren, with his carefully trained artist’s eye, must find it nearly offensive in its atrocity.

“It’s…well,” Ren starts. “I wasn’t gonna say anything about it, but it’s…bad.”

“You don’t have to be kind to it, Ren, it isn't going to hurt my feelings,” Hux says. “It isn’t some heirloom from my beloved and tragically deceased great aunt or anything of the sort, it’s just a very ugly painting.”

“Well, in that case,” Ren says, “yeah, it’s fucking awful, and I kind of wanna throw up every time I see it.”

His simple, deadpan honesty almost startles Hux into laughter; almost, but doesn’t quite. Hux is not a man easily startled.

Ren shifts from one foot to another, restless. “No offense, but like, if this is supposed to be some kind of metaphoric life lesson or some shit, it’s not really helping.”

“It isn’t,” Hux says. “No metaphors. I’m showing you this because I’d like to commission a replacement from you.”

Ren sputters, actually sputters aloud, the way Hux has only seen people do on television.

“You _what_ now?” Ren asks. He sounds a bit like he might faint, like he can’t believe what he’s hearing.

“A commission,” Hux repeats, pragmatic and businesslike. “You are an artist, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, but I -“

“So I assume you’ve taken commissions before.”

“I mean I have but you -“

“So it seems quite obvious to me,” Hux says, “that I should pay you to create a replacement for this truly horrendous piece of - well, I won’t insult you by calling this _art -_ so that you can continue to afford to live here, feed yourself, and maintain your prescriptions.” It sounds good, concrete, laid out like that, and it settles in him with the satisfaction of sliding the very last piece of a puzzle into place.

Ren stays quiet, though, and his feeling of satisfaction starts to fade, putter out into realization that he’s commandeered the entire situation, given Ren no chance to respond, to react, to voice his thoughts.

“If that’s something you’d like to do, of course,” Hux adds.

“That would be…” Ren trails off, swallows. “I mean, if that’s what you want, I’ll do it, but. Like, you’ve never seen any of my art. For all you know, all of it’s just as shitty as this thing is.”

“Nothing could possibly be as shitty as this print, Ren,” Hux says decisively. “And I’m rather inclined to think that a person who attended art school might be just a little bit good at art, am I correct?”

He looks at Ren fully for the first time, meets his eyes for the briefest second before Ren flushes, looks down.

“I mean, I’m not terrible,” Ren admits in what Hux is sure is an understatement. “I just don’t know if my kind of thing is really your kind of thing.”

“Meaning what?”

Ren places a hand on the back of his neck, twisting the very ends of his hair. “Meaning I’m not really sure that the kind of thing that I usually paint is something you want hanging in your front entryway for everyone to see.”

 _Oh Lord,_ is Hux’s first thought, _he paints nudes._

He forces himself to swallow his sudden fear and reluctance; he’s in too deep to back out of this now.

“I have a portfolio,” Ren says. He’s slouching enough that he’s looking up at Hux through the chunks of hair hanging in his eyes. “If you wanted to look at that before you committed to it?”

Hux nods a bit weakly, trying to keep the hesitancy out of his face. “Sure,” he says, and then Ren is pattering away down the hallway, nearly jogging, and Hux can only assume his urgency is due to the buildup of nervous tension, some of which Hux is currently collecting for himself.

Fortunately Ren is back within moments, clutching a black book the size of a briefcase against his chest. He pushes the bowl on the entryway table to the side and lays the book down. He glances at Hux before he reaches to open it, and Hux inhales, steeling himself for anything he might see, as Ren opens the book.

The paintings are…not what he expected.

The image on the first page is a photograph of a larger painting; presumably, one that was too large for Ren to keep with him, or else one given to someone else as a commission. The subject of the painting is a girl in a Victorian style dress pulled up to her knees, hair in a thick, elaborate up-do - but her hair is crawling with insects, maggots and moths and wasps and more that Hux can’t identify, and her feet are bare and muddy, the hem of her dress ragged and torn. In her arms she’s cradling a skull with a wide, gaping jaw, crowned with a circlet of stringy purple flowers. The painting is detailed to the point of being hyperrealistic; if it weren’t for the rather bizarre subject matter Hux would swear it was a photograph. He can see every strand of the woman’s hair, every fractured little line on the skull, and the mud on her feet looks as though as if he reached out and touched it, it would be wet.

He flips to the next page, then the next. Insects and skulls are recurring themes, though some of the paintings are less detailed than the first, more abstract. He sees odd and creeping plants, things in jars, ravens, owls, and scraggy trees; gaunt looking people and gleaming bones in a variety of settings. No matter what, every new piece he sees has him thinking, _of course,_ of _course_ this is what Ren paints, of course the faux-goth way in which he dresses himself extends into his art, or perhaps it's the opposite, that what he paints extends directly onto his body. But despite the eeriness of some of the paintings, the general creepiness of their subjects, Ren’s art is serene and soft in a way Hux can’t quite explain. The women cradling tarantulas to their chests don’t look perturbed or disgusted; the men in graveyards don’t look distraught to be there. The still-lifes are especially peaceful, strange collections of objects resting cohesively together, somehow always balanced and harmonious.

They’re intriguing to look at, and above all they’re _beautiful._ Hux had suspected that Ren had at least a modicum of talent, but he hadn't expected these, and he feels a slight prickle of indignation that Ren _isn’t_ making a living off of his art alone, that no one is looking at these paintings in awe and all but throwing their money at Ren.

“I know they’re kind of weird,” Ren says, voice ringing with uncertainty. “I can tone it down a little for yours, if you want me to.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, don’t tone anything down.” The thought of forcing Ren to edit himself, to take away any of the omnipresent character of his work, seems cruel, like snipping a bird’s wings. “Paint whatever you want. Anything.”

“Are you sure?” Ren asks him, looking at him hard, as if he’s expecting Hux to snatch everything back at the last minute.

Hux holds his gaze, smooth and solid, but not cold, tilting his chin up. “Ren,” he says, “do I seem like a man who’s often unsure about things?”

Ren bites down on his lower lip, but it’s a different gesture than the one from earlier. It showcases how white his teeth are, sinking into the plush, rich pinkness of his mouth.

“No,” he says, his dark eyes raking over Hux’s once again. “I suppose you don’t.”

Hux forces himself to look away. Ignores the sudden rush of blood that seems to be pooling in the lobes of his ears and the back of his neck.

“Well then,” he says. His mouth is ever so slightly dry. “Do we have a deal?”

Ren’s head tilts to one side, some of his hair falling away from his eyes, revealing more of his face than Hux has ever seen at once. The left side of his mouth quirks up in what might be a smile.

“Yeah,” Ren says. “Deal.”

* * *

 

In the weeks that follow, Hux finds himself constantly on the verge of asking his roommate who he is and what he’s done with Kylo Ren.

After their conversation, when Ren retreated to his bedroom for the night, Hux had set up his laptop on the kitchen counter and searched the names on Ren’s prescription bottles until he found the prices for each, added them together, and then threw on an extra few hundred for his own peace of mind. Then he’d gone into his bedroom and extracted that amount from an inconspicuous shoebox hidden in the top of his closet and slipped it into an envelope which he propped, unmarked, against Ren’s bedroom door for him to discover in the morning. Not giving him the money directly was the best way he could think of to avoid Ren’s protests at the amount.

The next day, Ren had risen early again, left the apartment, and returned mid-afternoon with a rattling pharmacy bag, a canvas, and an armful of paint tubes. He’d had an expression on his face that Hux had never seen before, bright-eyed and aware, and the way he was clutching the art supplies, like they were more precious than diamonds, had tugged ever so slightly at something in Hux’s chest. He was fairly buzzing with energy, _good_ energy, not the kind of barely restrained thunderstorm energy he sometimes stormed in with right before he went to his room to throw things around. The way he’d looked at Hux when he’d passed him had been...well, nervous, as if he still thought Hux might change his mind and take everything back, but also as if Hux had given him some priceless gift. That quiet, shining gratitude, while somewhat touching, had left a guilty little flavor in the back of Hux’s throat for hours, rising up from the knowledge that he didn’t really deserve it for what for him was such a small gesture, and for Ren such a big one. If he thinks hard enough about it now, the taste comes back.

Ren’s bedroom door is always open now, and the window within it is too, letting in light and breeze and a few flies that Millicent delights in catching and eating all over the apartment. He plays his music out loud, now, rather than over headphones, and if Hux strains to listen sometimes he swears he can hear Ren humming along to it.

He can’t say that he sees Ren all that much more than before - when he isn’t at work, he’s almost always in his room, working on the painting - but when he does it always gives him pause, makes him wonder if he isn't looking at a completely different human being. Ren seems so _alive,_ so _animated;_ his movements seem different, lighter somehow, freer, his face more relaxed, as if he’s constantly on the verge of smiling. Hux comes home sometimes to find him staring contentedly out the living room window, or playing with Millicent, tossing her tiny mouse toys across the rug for her to chase after. He keeps his hair tied back now, presumably to keep it out of his face while he’s working, and it only serves to remind Hux that Ren has big, captivating eyes the color of black coffee and smooth milky skin and all sorts of things that Hux shouldn't be noticing about him, that he refuses outright to notice about him. At least for consistency’s sake Ren seems just as chaotic as he normally is, leaving messes wherever he goes and walking around covered in paint, but he seems so relaxed that Hux can’t bring himself to say anything. He straightens Ren’s tattered combat boots in the entryway and ignores the flecks of paint starting to stain the carpet in the hallway. His apartment has always been too immaculate anyway.

Hux has no sense of how long paintings take to complete, and Ren offers no estimate of when it might be done, so he simply lets Ren work. Part of him never wants Ren to finish, because with nothing new to work on, he fears Ren might retreat back into his old self, a quiet, dark little shell with a closed bedroom door and hair hiding him away from the world. Ren is so much happier and healthier this way, his presence in the apartment a touch of lamplight rather than an ever-hovering raincloud. For reasons both selfish and unselfish, Hux hates the thought of losing this Ren, this happy, light, relaxed Ren, the Ren who’s even started to come to the dinner table sometimes and start conversations that wind from taste in music and books to sprinkled-in little details about his life, his past. Hux learns more in two weeks about Ren than he’s learned in the past six months of living with him. He has a cousin named Rey, he grew up in the South, his uncle lives in middle of nowhere to meditate and commune with nature. He seems fond of his mother but always skims over mentions of his father in conversation. Hux doesn’t press him; he understands that all too well.

One night Ren creeps into the living room clutching several tubes of paint and a paper plate to his chest and hovers in the corner without speaking until Hux looks up from his book.

“Yes?” Hux says. It's’ clear from his posture, his tightened shoulders, that Ren wants something but is reluctant to ask for it.

“Can I…” He clears his throat. “Can I come in here for a little bit? It’s getting kinda dark in my room and I need to mix this like, really specific shade of grey, and so I sorta need to be able to see it really well.”

Hux doesn’t point out that the living room is a common area and Ren is, of course, welcome to be in it whenever he wishes; he simply nods his consent and watches Ren cross the living room, settle himself down on his stomach, socked feet crossed at the ankles. It isn’t lost on him one bit that Ren has purposefully placed himself a good distance away from Hux, as if there exists some impenetrable barrier between the two of them, one that they breached that night in Hux’s kitchen and have since retreated back from.

It shouldn’t matter to him. If that’s where Ren feels safer, then that’s where he needs to be, even if it makes Hux’s throat tighten up in a way he hasn’t been familiar with for a long time.

He returns his focus to the book on his lap, to Millicent curled up and purring against his left leg, but he finds his eyes wandering away from the pages from time to time, drifting up to Ren and then back down again. Ren has his brow furrowed in intense concentration, his tongue poking out from between his teeth as he dispenses carefully measured amounts of paint onto the plate and mixes, mixes, mixes, studies the color, holds it up to the light, then huffs in dissatisfaction and puts it back down to add more paint.

Hux catches himself looking, drags his eyes back down to his book. He reads a page, gets to the end, and realizes he has no idea what he’s just read, and reads it again with the same result. He sighs and closes the book with a snap, putting it down on the coffee table.

“Not good?” Ren asks. Hux, surprised, looks up at him once again; Ren’s attention is focused almost entirely on his paints, but the way he’s keeping his eyes trained carefully down lets Hux know that his attempt to engage him in conversation is deliberate, probably premeditated.

“No, the book’s fine, it’s me,” Hux says, laying back just a little against the couch. “More tired than I thought I was, apparently.”

Ren hums in response. His right hand swirls the paintbrush in tight little circles on the plate, around and around and around.

“What do you...do? You know, at work?” Ren asks. He adds another dollop of black to the plate. Mixes, mixes, mixes.

Watching Ren willingly making small talk feels a little like seeing a unicorn but Hux knows better than to question it; best not to look a gift horse (can he consider a normal conversation with his roommate a gift?) in the mouth.

“I’m an accountant,” Hux says. “I do freelance finance consultations for a number of small businesses in the area.”

Ren snorts.

“Oh my God, of course you do,” he says, then looks a little bit stricken. “I’m sorry, that was rude, I didn’t mean...I just meant, I’m not surprised, because you’re, like, you know…”

“Uptight and boring?” Hux suggests.

“I was gonna say ‘meticulous’,” Ren says, going slightly pink.

“That’s kind of you,” Hux says. He doesn’t try to puzzle out whether that may have been a compliment or not, because thinking about it makes his stomach do funny, immature little things that he absolutely hates. “I doubt very many people would be that generous in their descriptions of me.”

And here Ren does, finally, look up to peer at Hux with those too big, too soft eyes.

“Why?” he inquires, voice infused with innocent curiosity. As if he can’t imagine that someone could find Hux overbearing and intolerable and severe and all the other ways Hux has heard himself described in the course of his life.

It takes him a minute to remember how to breathe correctly.

“Why, Ren, didn’t you know?” Hux asks dryly, because his chest hurts and he can’t talk about this, can’t talk about it, he can’t, not now, maybe not ever.

Ren shakes his head, wide-eyed.

Hux leans forward, as if to dispense some life-changing secret. “I’m actually a robot,” he whispers conspiratorially. “It’s been hard keeping this secret from you but I hope you’ll be able accept living with an artificial human being. At least you won’t have to lie awake at night wondering what on earth that drawer of double-A batteries in the kitchen is for anymore.”

Ren laughs.

At first, he doesn’t recognize it for what it is: Ren ducks his head, his shoulders start to tremble, and Hux is a breath away from asking if he’s about to throw up when the laughter bubbles up from his chest, hot and overflowing like boiling water. He laughs with his whole body, chest and shoulders jerking, his eyes shut and brow crinkling while the exhilarating sound of his laugh fills every space in the room (in Hux). He snorts, once, near the end, and when he’s done goes back to mixing his paint as if nothing has happened, though the smile sticks on his face for minutes afterwards. Hux knows this because he can’t look away for all that time.

When it finally retreats, Hux excuses himself to his room for the night. Once the door is firmly shut he leans heavily back against it, slides all the way down with his eyes shut, and tells himself, very firmly, to stop. That Ren doesn’t deserve this…objectification, this predation. He has the right to not be watched hungrily in his own home without his knowledge. Hux’s feelings are inconsequential; what he _wants_ matters very little compared to what Ren _needs._ He needs safety, consistency. A friend who he can trust.

That’s what Hux has become to him, and it’s all he can ever be. It is what it is. He will get over Ren. He has to.

(He just isn’t sure how yet.)

* * *

 

Hux is barely through the doorway when all of his personal space, his whole vision, is suddenly overwhelmed with _Ren._

Ren, who is quite nearly vibrating with excitement, who seems almost breathless in his exhilaration. There is white paint smeared all the way across his cheek and arching across his nose. Hux wants to wipe it away with his thumb, let his hand cup Ren’s face as he does so, but he doesn’t. Refrains. Breathes.

“I finished,” Ren rushes out before Hux can ask. “I finished the painting, and it’s, I mean, it’s really…” He pauses in his fumble for the right words, looks imploringly at Hux. “Do you wanna see it?”

Hux hasn’t even set down his briefcase. His back hurts, he’s tired, and Millicent needs to be fed.

“Of course I want to see it,” Hux says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

Ren lights up like the sun, like the fucking _sun_ ; his eyes are gleaming like Hux has never seen before, and he is beaming, actually beaming, his crooked, gappy canine teeth on full display, and he has never looked more beautiful than he does right at this moment. Luckily he is moving too fast for Hux to process everything this is making him _feel,_ and his long, paint-stained fingers find Hux’s shirt sleeve, tug him down the hallway, and Hux has to trot to keep up, his pulse pounding in his ears.

Ren pulls him through his bedroom doorway. The canvas - the _painting -_ is resting on an easel in the center of the room, but it is turned away, towards the opposite wall. Empty paint tubes and ramen cups are scattered around the easel’s base, as if protecting it.

Ren lets go of his wrist to walk towards the easel, towards the painting, and as he reaches it his earlier excitement becomes muted, stifled under nerves. He glances from the painting to Hux and back again, reaches out to grip the edges of the canvas, but he doesn’t turn it, not yet. Anticipation catches Hux’s breath in his chest. Something in the atmosphere, in the dynamic between himself and Ren, is shifting, changing; in this moment it is shapeless, definitionless, amorphous, and when Ren turns the painting around it will be solidified, in one way or another. The way it solidifies rests solely in the way Hux reacts to it.

For once, this is a power that Hux does not want.

Ren turns the painting around.

The piece is done only in black and white and shades of grey (suddenly Ren’s conscientious, near-obsessive mixing of greys makes sense). The focal point of the painting is the skull of a deer, gleaming immaculate white, with broad, proud antlers that are twisted through with twinkling fairy lights and strands of rosemary and thyme. It takes Hux a moment to realize that the skull is not isolated, but attached to a body, a human body, a man’s body, wearing a smartly tailored suit, accented with a neatly folded pocket square. The deer-man has both hands reached out, one holding a lantern that emits a light that illuminates the whole painting, seems to reach off of the canvas to light the whole room. The other hand is empty, stretching out as if to take the hand of whoever is looking at the painting, threatening to pull them in - but, no, the gesture is not a threat, but an offer of help, of support, of camaraderie, warm and inviting, like the lantern.

On the deer-man’s shoulder rests a single moth, huddling close to both the light of the lantern and the base of the skull. It looks safe. Contented. Protected, in the way that the deer-man is offering to protect the viewer.

The painting is breathtakingly and overwhelmingly beautiful.

Even above the sheer detail, the sheer _color_ Ren has managed to present in only black and white and grey, even more impressive than that, is the _emotion_ of it. The deer-man’s vacant skull face shouldn’t be capable of expressing anything, much less this warmth, this friendliness, this _love,_ but it does, and Hux thinks that it must be because of all that Ren poured into it, all his feelings, putting precision and care and _love_ in every single brushstroke, every mix of color until he created _this._

Hux has never been a consumer of art. Art is supposed to make you feel something, they say. Hux has never wanted to feel something that way, never thought it could really happen, just by looking, that his shields could be lowered and his protection stripped away by nothing more than some paint on a canvas. But now, he understands; this painting is more than a painting, it is Ren’s soul made physical, Ren’s heart made tangible, laid all out in black and white for Hux to see and be moved by, to be carried away by, to be taken somewhere he has never intended to go but is now stranded, stranded, stranded, not knowing what to do.

He has never really understood art. But this art, he understands.

He comes back to his body from some other place, and Ren is standing before him, waiting, hands picking at his cuticles, waiting for Hux’s judgement. Hux cannot find words yet to give it, has to swallow, once, twice, so many times that Ren is moved to ask.

“Well?” Ren says, in an undertone, so that the quiet spell that has taken over the room remains unbroken. “What do you think?”

“I think,” Hux says, just as soft, just as gentle, “that it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

And Ren glows, _glows,_ not in the beaming sun way from before, but in a warm, understated way, from the inside out. Like a jack-o-lantern. Like a fireplace. Like coming home.

“Really?” Ren asks. “You really do like it?”

Hux would have accused anyone else of fishing for compliments but Ren can have all the compliments he wants, all the compliments Hux can come up with, can give breath to, because he deserves them; he _needs_ them, some wound somewhere deep in him, deeper than Hux can dare to reach yet, is soothed by them.

“I love it,” Hux says, makes sure Ren can hear it in his voice. “Ren - Kylo, it’s stunning, really. Unbelievable.”

“Thank you,” Ren says, so shy, so pleased. “I really…I really wanted you to like it. I wanted it to be really good. As a…as a thank you.”

Hux stares into the vacant-full eyes of the deer skull, and they stare back at him. Inviting. Encouraging. Realization dawns.

“It’s of me, isn’t it?” he asks slowly.

Ren’s eyes dart away and then back. “What?”

“The deer…that’s…forgive me for assuming, but it’s meant to be me, isn’t it?” He feels foolish as soon as he says it; he’s reading too much into it, that can’t be how Ren sees him, it can’t be. He is not that warm, has never been that warm, that open, that full of sheer capacity, sheer willingness to _love._

“It…it is,” Ren admits, and Hux’s heart turns over in his chest. “I didn’t think…well, it wasn’t meant to be that obvious. You…you don’t have to hang it up, if that makes you uncomfortable.”

Hux sees the dark, dark raincloud of doubt creeping back over him, threatening to overwhelm the glow.

He can’t have that.

“It doesn’t,” he says. “But I may have to retract my earlier statement on the painting.”

“Oh?”

“I said that I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Hux says. “But I’ve changed my mind. I think it’s the second.”

The words hang, drift, and Hux sees when Ren catches them in his eyes, searching Hux, searching, searching, not wanting to think, not wanting to believe. No one speaks, perhaps for a minute, or perhaps for several hundred years. Hux doesn’t know and never will.

“You’ve got paint,” he says dumbly. “Just here.” He gestures in a line along his own face, where the white smear streaks across Ren’s own.

“Do I?” Ren murmurs. His eyes don’t leave Hux’s, nor do his hands move to wipe the paint away.

 _Well, then,_ Hux thinks, and steps forward.

He reaches as if to touch a wild animal, one that might bolt in a split second, but Ren does not move, does not flinch. He waits. He waits and Hux reaches, reaches up to Ren’s face and drags his thumb through the paint. The gesture does little to rid Ren’s face of paint; it smears under Hux’s thumb, wet and cold. Ren’s eyes are so, so dark. A strand of hair fallen free of his bun to lay across his face flutters every time he breathes. His skin is as soft as he thought it would be.

He cups Ren’s face, and then he is kissing him.

Kissing him like he hasn't kissed anyone in years. Kissing him like he might evaporate beneath Hux’s lips and be lost forever if Hux doesn’t kiss him with everything he has. He kisses Ren like he kissed his very first boyfriend, at fifteen years old with too-short pants and a heart that still believed in love.

And then he waits, pulling back, breathing open-mouthed against Ren’s soft lips.

Ren - _Kylo_ has his eyes closed, and the doubt flickers in Hux for only a moment before Kylo leans forward to rest his forehead against Hux’s own, his hands drifting to rest on Hux’s waist. He sighs, deep and low, and it makes every part of Hux’s body warm.

“You know,” he says, “most people just tip with a twenty or something.”

“I’m not most people.”

Kylo smiles. “Yeah, I know.”

They stand, suspended, in what feels like peace. It won’t last, Hux knows. They have so much to talk about. A kiss is not the be-all-end-all of anything. But right now it feels like conclusion, like the end of one chapter flowing into the beginning of the next, and it feels good, and it feels warm, and Kylo smells good, smells strong and tangy, like paint.

“I’ve been thinking,” Hux says. “The walls in the living room are looking a little bare. It would be nice to have something to hang up in there, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Kylo says, voice light and warm, “it would.”


End file.
